Allies

The book begins with a section entitled “Operation Neptune: June 6, 1944, Just Before Dawn on the English Channel.”

Dee Carpenter, the protagonist, is a 16-year-old US soldier from Philadelphia whose unit is at sea rendezvousing with other Ally forces to storm the Omaha beach in Normandy. Dee and his friend Sid, who is Jewish, are nervous as they get into the small boat that will take them to shore. Another soldier calls Sid a Jewish ethnic slur, and Dee stands up for his friend. However, Dee is hiding something from his friend—he is actually a German named Dietrich Zimmermann.

As the small boat begins to head toward shore, Dee reflects on the circumstances that led him to this point. He was born in Germany and lives in the US as an “enemy alien.” Germans are allowed to fight for the US Army, but Dee, at 16, is too young to do so without his parents’ permission. However, he wants to fight Hitler, and he forges his documents to be allowed into the army, a relatively common practice at the time. The recruiting officer who processes his paperwork gives him an American alias, Douglas (“Dee”) Carpenter, in case he is captured by German soldiers. No one in Dee’s unit knows his true identity.

As his unit waits for the signal to advance, Dee remembers being a young child in Germany. One of his uncles, a labor union leader, mysteriously disappeared when Dee was five, and the family suspects that the Nazis abducted him as punishment for his labor efforts.

Dee’s boat starts to move toward the French shore, and he worries about what Sid would think of him if he knew he was a German. He reflects on the importance of the moment, which he knows could alter the course of the entire war.

This chapter is the first in a new section of the book, titled “Operation Tortoise.” The events are six hours prior to Dee landing on the beach. The section is told from the perspective of Samira Zidane, an 11-year-old French Algerian girl whose mother is involved with the French resistance against the occupying Nazis. Samira and her mother fled Paris four years prior when the Nazis invaded the city, after her father was killed for protesting the German invasion. Samira’s parents dreamed of Algeria becoming independent from France.

Samira accompanies her mother on a clandestine journey out of their village at night after the Nazi curfew to tell other resistance fighters that the Allies will be landing on the beach the next morning. Samira has gone with her mother on such missions before and acts as a cover for her mother in case the Nazis catch them, feigning illness that requires a doctor. As they make their way out of the village, the two see German soldiers rounding up French citizens in retaliation for the resistance killing a Nazi leader. Samira’s mother sees a woman helping her children get out of their house to evade the Nazis and runs to help, even though the two planned to remain hidden so they could complete their errand.

As Samira’s mother is helping the French family get their children away from the Nazis, the soldiers discover the entire group. Samira’s mother had instructed her to quiet the family’s dog who was barking in the yard, and so Samira hides in the doghouse as the Nazis take her mother and the French family away. Samira’s mother calls out in Arabic for Samira not to follow her.

Samira narrowly avoids discovery as she hides in the doghouse. The German soldiers leave, and Samira is left with the dog. She decides to set it free, since its owners have been taken away. Instead of listening to her mother and going somewhere safe, Samira is determined to continue toward the resistance fighters so they can rescue her mother.

The dog she rescued follows Samira, who runs in the direction of the place she wants to meet the resistance fighters. As she goes, she remembers being discriminated against at the school she attended in Paris before the war, where she wasn’t allowed to wear the headscarf that was a mark of her Algerian identity, and she was never cast in the school play, despite her desire to act. She stops, as two German soldiers are guarding a bridge that she needs to cross.

Samira puts the dog under a basket and then tells the soldiers she’s lost her dog. She calls the dog by a made-up name (Cyrano), causing it to get out of the basket and run to her. She secretly throws it a stick to make it run away again on the other side of the bridge, using it as an excuse to run off into the woods.

Samira finds the resistance fighters shortly after she enters the forest. They surround her to find out who she is, giving her a chance to observe their motley appearance, made up of clothes and weapons taken from various sources. The resistance uses the symbol of the Cross of Lorraine on their clothing as a symbol of French freedom from the Nazis.

Samira tells the resistance fighters that the Nazis have taken her mother, and she delivers the message about the Ally invasion on the beaches. The fighters excitedly begin preparing to assist the D-Day efforts but refuse to directly try and rescue Samira’s mother, who is being kept prisoner in a garrison in the city of Bayeux, about 15 miles away. Distraught, Samira nonetheless knows that the resistance is her best chance at helping her mother, and she follows the soldiers.

The resistance fighters head to a railway “switching station” (where two sets of tracks split off from one) to cause an explosion in a tunnel just before the station. Along the way, one of the resistance fighters with the code name Perseus voices suspicions about Samira because she is Algerian. Perseus doesn’t think Algerians are loyal to the French cause, but another fighter with the alias “Jason” defends Samira. As they pause near the switching station, which is a manned hut with a French guard inside, the fighters debate about whether to kill the guard or not. While they argue, Cyrano trots up to the hut’s door.

The station guard hears Cyrano bark and opens the door, causing Samira and the resistance to reveal themselves. The guard turns out to be a French veteran of World War I and loyal to the French cause, using his position at the station to slow down German trains. He supports the resistance efforts and tells the fighters where to cut telephone lines.

Samira stays in the hut with the guard while the fighters go back to blow up the tunnel. They succeed, but not before a German train filled with tanks gets through, headed toward the switching station. The guard and Samira hurry to see if they can intercept the train.

Jason joins Samira and the guard to sabotage the train tracks and derail the train. The three work frantically and manage to destroy a portion of track, sending train off the track and down into a riverbed. (Samira and the guard warn the train’s French engineers in time for them to jump off the train first.) Jason, however, has disappeared in the chaos, and Samira realizes that he is dead.

The guard tells Samira that he will likely be discovered by the Nazis and punished for helping derail the train. Before she leaves, Samira makes a mess in his hut and ties him up to make it look as though the resistance raided his hut and stopped him from preventing the fighters. Then, she decides to head to the city where her mother is being kept prisoner. As she leaves, she notices that Ally parachuters have begun descending from the sky.